Issue 105

The trouble with language is the language:  
its lack, its want, its suffering—all the fire 
I have worshipped morning and evening. 

Took far too long to know I had stopped living  
and begun wearing my life instead.   

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

In our solemn conversations about the firemen, in our statements of unconditional loyalty and trust, I realize that maybe instead of the moral authority of God in our household, I have given Toby the firemen. Brave and noble, yes, but a shabby substitute for the Almighty.

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

I have hurt my father two times that I know of.

Everything close enough fades  

in the coming dark; what’s at a distance, 
gone.

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she taught Native American literature and creative writing.She has published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as screenplays and plays—and increasingly, as in her new book, Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job (Turtle Point, 2020),…

The spaded earth spurts in fury: 
a geyser of yellow jackets torque  

from their lair.